<p>There will be a considerable one-time cost involved in establishing a robust

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x86 arch team--a good number of bodies (the amd64 arch team has 19 active devs

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and 12 active non-dev arch testers) need to be recruited to be part of the

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new arch team, and convincing devs that it is in their best interests to work

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in a new fashion is likely to be even harder. Certainly the benefit of

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consistency between the various archs is obvious, but is it worth the cost

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involved? Here are the arguments for enduring the pain involved:</p>

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<ulclass="simple">

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<li>Over time, x86 is likely to become a minority arch as 64-bit systems

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become the norm. The implicit assumptions that underly the current

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system (that most devs, users, and package maintainers use x86)

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will become increasingly less valid.</li>

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<li>Markedly improved QA for x86. Assuming that the author's own is

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behavior is representative, most x86 devs run <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">~x86</span></tt> systems.

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Thus, the assumption that devs are good <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">x86</span></tt> testers is not really

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valid. One obvious consequence is that packages tend to languish in

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<ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">~x86</span></tt> for a very long time, since x86 devs running <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">~x86</span></tt> have little

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cause to notice that a package has not been marked stable. The much larger

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effect, though, is that it is rare for <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">x86</span></tt> packages to be stabled in

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the context of a full <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">x86</span></tt> tree, so the big picture of a stable

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<em>system</em>, not just a stable package, is lost. This approach of stabling

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in the context of a full stable <ttclass="docutils literal"><spanclass="pre">arch</span></tt> tree, it has been <aclass="reference"href="http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.linux.gentoo.devel/30369">argued</a><aclass="footnote-reference"href="#id6"id="id7"name="id7">[3]</a>, is